Do the eyes have it? : Simple Psychological Experiments on Eye Gaze

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Suppose you notice that someone is looking toward a direction.Are you a type of person who can’t help looking at the same direction as that person is looking, or who never care about what others are looking at?

This App allows you to conduct psychological experiments to measure your susceptibility to others’ gaze direction.

The measurement procedure is simple.[1] At the center of the screen, one of the characters of my previous App ‘Gaze Game’ is displayed. The measurement starts when you tap the face.[2] An apple appears to the left or right of the face. Tap the apple as quickly as possible. Your reaction time is measured.[3] This procedure is repeated a number of times.

Just before the apple comes in, the face at the center of the screen looks to the left or right. However, you should NOT trust the face’s eyes, because their direction is absolutely irrelevant to the apple’s position.

Suppose you are susceptible to others’ gaze direction.When the face directly looks at the apple, you may tap the apple quickly. However, when the face looks opposite to the apple, your reaction to the apple may be delayed a bit.

If you are not susceptible to others’ gaze direction, your reaction time to the apple should not be influenced by the directions the face is looking.

This App calculates your gaze susceptibility score, which is simply obtained by subtracting your reaction time when the face looked at the apple from the reaction time when the face looked opposite to the apple. The higher the score is, the more likely you are susceptible to others’ gaze direction.

Note: 'Gaze susceptibility score' defined in this App is not a psychological term. However, the experimental procedures employed here are based on actual psychological studies, in which a phenomenon called ‘gaze orienting’ or ‘gaze following’ has been investigated.